If you've been on the edge of your seat waiting for news about this year's MozCon, wait no longer! We've got a sneak preview of our talks and a few other awesome tidbits of news to share as we get closer to September. Grab your tickets early — we've sold out for the last 5 years running!

Ever wondered what it's like to be on stage, under those bright lights, sharing your knowledge? Not sure what it takes to be successful? Landing and preparing for a speaking gig is hard. Here are some tips about how to set goals, be professional, get bookings, and more.

Looking to level up your local marketing and SEO skills? Join us for MozCon Local, Thursday and Friday, February 18-19, 2016 in Seattle. With both an all-day conference and a half-day workshop, you'll hear from top local speakers on topics critical to local marketing.

One of our favorite things about MozCon is introducing all of you to Seattle. We love our city, and besides three days of marketing learning, we also host three night events and facilitate other fun events.

Get a front-row experience for all 28 sessions, plus their slide decks, with the 2014 MozCon Video Bundle. Bringing you future-focused advice and actionable recommendations from some of the industry's most innovative minds, MozCon topics range from SEO and A/B testing to analytics and content marketing.

Conferences can be spendy when you add up ticket costs, travel, hotel, meals, and more. It's important that you can justify a positive ROI when it comes to your budget. Find out the value and costs of your MozCon ticket.

We've launched MozCon 2013 tickets! Join us July 8th-10th at the WA State Convention Center in Seattle to celebrate and launch your inbound marketing skills into outer space. Early bird tickets are going quickly.

Editing your own writing is the worst part of writing, no matter your profession. In today's Whiteboard Friday, our very own Community Attachè shares her tips for turning the arduous process of editing into something beautiful.

Good things come to those who wait, and you've all been waiting patiently for our new Mozinar series. We're happy to announce that our Mozinars are back and better than ever. Best of all, they're now free for everyone!

MozCon 2012 tickets are here! Join us for a three day deep-dive into advanced search engine optimization, social media, conversion rate optimization, content marketing, analytics, and more. Early birds get the best priced worm!
"MozCon is like Disneyland for SEOs, jampacked with super-geeky SEO Magic Tricks, and great chances to meet and say hello to others in the search industry." -- Pete Campbell

Google+ has crept into SERPs near you. From getting hyper-personalized results popping up everywhere to recommending people to follow or showing you results you've +1'd or posts you've made, Google+ isn't giving you the choice to ignore it. Instead, embrace the win-sparkle of personalization.

Holy smokes, I don't think our product and development teams have slept since Thanksgiving; they're probably really dreaming of figgy pudding with all the new features they've been creating. These four features: universal search, historical link metrics, custom reports, and branded keywords are definitely squee-worthy. Plus, there's a bonus that you might've not heard about yet.

If you want to save money on transit, use Seattle's light rail. It'll cost you $3 ($6 to-and-from) to travel from the airport to MozCon and the partner hotels, or wherever you end up staying nearby. Taxis/Ubers/Lyfts/etc from the airport will run you anywhere between $35-60 each trip. The light rail's clean, safe, and built with luggage in mind, so you can either store it in luggage places or under the seats.

I'm also a fan of planning outside conference meals beforehand. There are great restaurants around downtown, but often, if you walk a couple more blocks, you'll find somewhere just as great and much, much cheaper.

Since this is more casual, I likely will not have a post going into what worked about the pitches themselves. Plus, being a 5-minute story, I want there to be surprises. But here are a few pitches that were accepted from last year:

Being a stunt double

In 2002, I was hired as the stunt double for Nightcrawler in X-Men 2’s opening scene inside the Whitehouse.

The casting directors called me which was odd because I didn't audition nor did I know that they were filming in my city. It was the result of them watching me jump on the trampoline at a gymnastics club I was coaching at. Apparently they were going to the clubs in the city to scout for the part. When they arrived at the club I was coaching at, I was jumping on the trampoline onto a wall and then pushing off the wall back onto the tramp. I would always do this trick to entertain the kids. And it was at that moment, they had found their Nightcrawler.

After a few weeks of training, we were ready for the 1st take and my heart was pounding with excitement.

I heard “Action!” and whoosh! I was flipping away. Once the take was done, I looked behind me and on the floor was my tail. It had ripped off while I was tumbling! I then looked under my trench coat and there was my butt exposed. The entire crew burst out laughing! This happened 3 times and finally ended up duct taping it to me & placing a wire from the tail to my chest so I wasn't flipping with my tail between my legs.

Raising My Parents

Several times in my life I’ve had to move back home with my parents, as many young people do. During each of these times, I’ve struggled with having my own life, living by my own rules, but being in their house, and proving that I didn’t need their help (even though I obviously did). Now, the tables have turned. My parents live with me and my family, and I find myself walking in their shoes.

I will talk through highlights (as well as low lights) of my experiences with raising my parents. In five minutes, I’ll have you in tears from the ridiculous idea of trying to be a parent to your parent, and the sad realization that somewhere along the way, I’ve actually become my mother.

A few of the topics:

Expecting them to live by my rules

Dealing with the, “Oh! you have a built in babysitter” comments by others

Making dinner for 5 people, 3 of which have very specific diets they follow

When they smuggle candy, soda, and other “no-no’s” into the house

Reading to my daughter before bed

Hugging my mom every night and every morning

Performing a Canine C-SectionI used to be a small animal veterinarian. One of my favorite things to do as a vet was a C-Section. They are so absolutely amazing. I am betting that most of the audience has never seen a C-Section and would love to know how they're done. I'll take the audience step by step through the procedure with photos and describe things like the following:-You have to know exactly where to cut.-The uterus is mind blowing. I'll show a pregnant vs a non-pregnant uterus and you will marvel at the difference.-Puppies all sit in their own sack. It'll be a little bit gross, but I'll show the puppies in the sack and then coming out of the sack.-Once the puppies are out we sometimes need to do some crazy things to help them breath like swinging them wildly. Seriously. It takes great skill to swing a soaking wet puppy and not fling it across the room.-Then we'll stitch everything up again.

This will be an entertaining talk and I'm pretty sure it will be unique. :)

Unfortunately, we don't have the staff in order to build communities in other languages. (It looks like you are in Spain, so I would highly recommend The Inbounder, which is partially in Spanish and then translated too.) We do try to add close captioning to our videos in order to help better comprehension, so at least you don't have to navigate an accent or fast talking.

Apparently, people do read my blog posts on what makes a great pitch. :) In all seriousness, if you can't make it to the show, we always put the decks up--and the speakers do on their personal Slideshares--and we do sell the videos post-show.

Just wanted to let you know that this post from 2012! This means that some of the information in the article may be out-of-date. And additionally, we've rebranded from SEOmoz to Moz since this post so things have changed on Twitter, such as us tweeting as @Moz. :)

The only way we were able to get it timed correctly was by working with Facebook directly. Which you can only really do if you have a Facebook ads rep. Though I wrote this post several years ago and Facebook may have changed a few things. (And I haven't rebranded anything recently.)

If you're worried about brand recognition, you can mention in your description that you changed names. At least for a little while until people figure it out. For a long time, Moz had "formerly SEOmoz" or something of that ilk on all our web properties including social media.

You should definitely keep an eye out for the week of MozCon as we typically start selling our super early bird tickets at the end of MozCon. (And they fly out the door.) If funds are your main hold back, that's the ticket price to get.

As a community manager here at Moz, I wanted to let you know that your comment is borderline self-promotional. Please know that we do keep an eye on incoming comments. Additionally, all our links in our comments are no-follow.

While I agree that GA makes is really easy to grab metrics, I disagree that it's easier to measure because Google Analytics does sampling instead of giving you exact numbers. And there's been many people (who are much smarter than me about website analytics) who argue that GA numbers can be very off compared to the actuals.

It really depends on your client's market and audience. With social media, you only want to use networks that you can find or develop market share on. For example, at Moz, we don't use Snapchat because most of our audience is over 25-years-old. Twitter can certainly still make sense for brands -- Moz's Twitter is our biggest and strongest social media following still -- but you have to figure out if your brand's audience is there and what you're going to be communicating or using that channel for.

As a platform, Twitter needs to do a lot of soul-searching. I'm a pretty avid Twitter user, and I often feel the reasons I love it aren't being understood by those at the helm. Community managers have, for a long time, cautioned about relying too much on building your audience on a platform that you don't own -- that another company can change at any moment -- so when changes like this happen or say Facebook algo changes, we can only be so mad because at the end of the day, it's not our site.

I agree. Not to mention that what people share does not correlate to what they actually read. I want people to read my content first and foremost. I was chatting traffic numbers recently for my comic book review blog with another marketer who was shocked at how low my traffic is, and my response was that my actual ROI of doing the reviews was getting people to read the books I recommend, which is what the people who actually read my blog do.

Oh, for some reason, the download links aren't showing. (They should be right next to the one to download the video.) Sorry about that. I'm getting it worked on, but in the meantime, here's an Evernote with all the links to all the decks.

Yesterday was April 1st aka April Fool's Day, and at Moz, we have a long tradition of April Fool's joke blog posts. One of my favorite ones was the one we did in 2013 - introducing the Moz Reader. As you know, one of Moz's values in TAGFEE is Fun, which means not every single one of our posts (or everything we do) will be super serious online marketing.

You are correct that our posts don't get as many thumbs up as they used to. This is NOT because the quality has gone down, and this is something that we are concerned about and working to actually address in the UX of the blog. (For instance, on our old blog format, you could thumb up a post at the bottom and before the comments. Now it's off to the right side and we think lots of people, due to ad and menu avoidance, just don't see it.) Another reason for less thumbs is that frankly, our community tends to thumb up post automatically (even without reading them!) from "famous" industry experts like Rand. On an editorial side, we not only want to feature posts from those like Rand, but we also want to grow new voices and new experts in our field.

Additionally, you mentioned that you've been reading our blog since 2012, and that's super awesome! But I bet in 2012, you probably knew less about SEO/online marketing and more posts were likely to have fresh ideas you hadn't discovered before due to your own knowledge level. Now that you're further into your career and more senior, it is going to be harder for you to find posts with ideas you haven't encountered. Editorially, the Moz Blog serves a wide audience of many knowledge levels, and we attempt to address issues and concerns for all of them. Our UX currently doesn't serve this well, and in the future, I know our team's working on it. Hopefully, in future iterations, it will be easier for you to identify which posts are at your intermediate/advanced knowledge level.

Probably what I do every year, nothing as I'm not a football fan. Also this year's Superbowl (according to my Google search) is the 7th and this year's conference (now called MozCon Local) is the 18-19th. :)

Truth. But sometimes I do see commentary that makes me actually question how people think brands with any kind of popularity effectively run their social media as if we should all be logging into Twitter directly. (Which we all know is the best way to tweet that photo of your cat to the brand's audience. :)

It is true that brands are all run by humans, and sometimes those humans make really bad decisions. When I see people being like "brands turn off your social media automation" -- as if the tweets just magically write, schedule, etc. themselves -- I raise my eyebrow.

Just to clarify, I was unfollowing people from my PERSONAL Twitter account, not Moz's. And I believe all the people I unfollowed that weekend were men who lived in the US. One of the major reasons I was so upset by the Isla Vista shooting was because the shooter specifically targeted women and blamed them (and his inability to get a date) for his actions. As Canadian writer Margaret Atwood said, "'Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." Without getting too much into my personal history with gun violence from men, it was highly emotionally upsetting for me to see every single woman tweeting about the horror and men tweeting about SEO. Anyway, since it's my personal account, I can unfollow anyone I want for whatever reason.

While I agree geography is important, at Moz, we do have a global community. I believe we did pause our social media when the major earthquake happened in Nepal.

It's up to the brand and the team to measure and gauge their own community to see how long they might pause it. At risk of sounding even more cynical, there were more mass shootings in the US in 2015 than days (at least at the beginning of December), which if we were pausing every time for a week, we might as well toss in the towel now. (And this doesn't even count natural disasters, what's happening outside the US, etc.) My time suggestions were to get people started, and in many cases, based on average lengths we've paused Moz's social media. Eventually people do start talking about other topics because that helps you heal, move onto the next steps, and can provide emotional relief, and yes, sometimes those topics are work-related.

I agree that we can't prepare for everything, but it's good to have a foundation to start somewhere. Could we predict a 9/11 in our social media management plans? No. But by having a plan for a smaller disaster, we can take the immediate steps and then go back and discuss as a team what we need to do. If nothing else, it buys us a little time and keeps us from acting like assholes.

I do think if there's a complete technological disaster, I won't have a job anymore and my youth on a ranch will probably be much more handy than any other ability. :)